News and commentary about road pricing across the globe. Tolls, congestion charging, distance based charging, road user charging. Public policy, economics, technology and more. If Google brought you here, look down the right sidebar for references.

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Update, changes soon

Readers

I have been offline for a few weeks for unfortunate personal family reasons. Apologies for this, I intend to return to "regular service" next week, following the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

I look forward to having more regular articles, a series of minor catchups on the sector and to dedicate a little more time to updating on tolling and road pricing across the world.

I am about news and commentary about road pricing. It exists today, in some form, in most countries although typically in the proxies called fuel tax and motor vehicle ownership taxes. The vast majority tolerate this, and there are many countries with tolls of some form.

Given that absence of efficient road pricing is characterised by road networks that are often underfunded, badly maintained, with significant cross subsidies in motoring taxes supporting the heaviest vehicles travelling the longest distances, and most inefficient of all - congestion, where demand for road space exceeds the ability of government road builders to supply it, it would appear that treated roads as "the commons" would seem to be far more a "bad idea" than treating them as economic goods that the users pay for according to usage.

However, feel free to defend taxing people to own a vehicle, or to use a fuel for which consumption bears next to no relationship to the consumption of road assets or road space when vehicles are used.

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What is road pricing?

Road pricing is any system that directly charges motorists for the use of a road or network of roads. Traditionally it has meant tolls on single routes, particularly crossings such as bridges or tunnels. More recently it also includes area, cordon and zone pricing of urban areas, and distance and time based charging of whole networks. It does not include fuel or tyre taxes, or taxes on ownership or purchase of road vehicles.